Speaker

About the speaker: 

Mar Vall-llosera is a food technologist and PhD candidate in BioScience, focusing on the evaluation of preservation strategies for seaweeds, in particular Ulva fenestrata biomass. Her research aims to tailor preservation methods to different food applications by assessing quality changes during storage and nutrient digestibility.

Her doctoral work is conducted within the Swedish research centre Blue Food as well as within the project BlueGreen, and involves close collaboration with seaweed farming and seafood companies, including Nordic Seafarm and Sweden Pelagic, ensuring strong industrial relevance and applicability of the research outcomes.

Company info:

Chalmers University of Technology, specifically the Undeland research group at the Food and Nutrition Science division, explores new pathways to harness the possibilities with sustainable blue biomasses such as seaweed, microalgae and underutilised fish raw materials for next generation seafood and beyond. Within the area of seaweeds, core research activities target the effect of cultivation on nutritional quality, scalable stabilisation methods, extraction of biomolecules such as ulvan and proteins, as well as nutrient digestibility and accessibility. 

Presentation: 

Several strategies for stabilising U.fenestrata, and in some cases also P.palmata, have been evaluated, showing that different species respond differently to stabilisation. Also, we have learned that the selection of stabilisation methods is an interesting route towards diversified uses of seaweed in foods. In Mar Vall-llosera´s work, several techniques for wet biomass stabilisation have been compared, such as high pressure processing (HPP), sous vide treatment, salt-/sugar-brining and fermentation, all significantly extending shelf-lifes. In addition, the effect of large scale drying combined with completely new antioxidant pre-treatments has been tested under long term storage, revealing highly interesting findings on how to maintain the original flavour and colour of seaweed.